updates on Gaza and Syria

Contrary to U.S. media spin, the violence didn’t begin when the three Israelis were abducted and killed in June. From January to June of this year, Israeli forces abducted at least 2,330 Palestinians, and killed approximately 30 Palestinians, 4 of whom were children. But Americans didn’t hear about it because the media didn’t think their lives mattered.

It’s also important to recognize that rocket attacks from Gaza began decades after Israel had already been militarily occupying Palestinian territory. The first rocket (largely home-made projectiles that rarely caused any death, injuries, or even damage) was fired from Gaza in April 2001 – after Israeli forces had already killed 35 Gazans that year, and had repeatedly shelled Gazan neighborhoods. From April 2001 through July 2014, rockets killed approximately 29 Israelis. During the same period, Israeli forces killed over 4,700 Gazans.

Here are the facts:

From January 1 to May 31 of this year, Israel kidnapped 2,330 Palestinians and held them in Israeli prisons. During these months, there were an average of 203 Palestinian children in Israeli jails on any given day. Palestinians help captive by Israel can be denied access to a lawyer for up to 90 days, and torture is routine. But the media only expresses outrage when Israelis are kidnapped and held prisoner by Palestinians.

From January 1 to June 12 of this year, Israelis killed approximately 30 Palestinians, 4 of them children. None of the Israeli killers were held accountable for the murders. Mainstream media outlets almost never reported on any of these killings. Yet everyone was made aware of the names of the three Israelis abducted and murdered in June.

Since “Operation Protective Edge” began (June 8 through July 21), Israeli forces have killed 572 Palestinians, 110 of them children. During this time, Palestinian resistance forces killed 28 Israelis, none of whom were children. Approximately 76 percent of the Palestinians killed during this period were civilians, while approximately 7 percent of the Israelis killed were civilians.

This page provides a current listing of total fatalities resulting from Gaza rockets and mortar shells into Israel and will be updated when necessary.

As I noted in my previous rocket fatality count, numbers distributed by Israeli agencies are wildly inaccurate and often contradictory. This is propounded by sources such as Wikipedia, which at the time of this writing repeats the discredited and unaccounted numbers provided by Israeli agencies.

At approximately 7:50 pm on Sunday, 20 July 2014, Israeli warplanes bombarded the house of Tawfiq Ahmad Abu Jame’. The three-story-house is inhabited by five families and is located in the Bani Suhaila town, east of Khan Younis district in the south of the Gaz Strip. The house, which was attacked without prior warning, was completely destroyed in the attack. Civil defense and ambulances crews rushed to the destroyed house to uncover the bodies buried under the rubble. It took them until the next day, Monday 21 July 2014, to uncover the victims. Medics found 26 bodies, 18 children and five women. Only three residents survived, and they sustained with varying injuries.

Yesterday, international and Palestinian volunteers accompanied Civil Defence and other rescue crews, as well as family members, into Shajiya neighbourhood in Gaza. They attempted to locate survivors of overnight and ongoing shelling by the Israeli army. A young Palestinian man in a green shirt hoped to find his family. He was shot by an Israeli soldier while crossing an alley between buildings. Two additional rounds struck him as he lay injured on the ground. His dead body could not be retrieved.

The ambulance shown in the video was shelled by the Israeli military, killing paramedic Faud Jaber.

Dr Mona el-Farra of the Red Crescent Society in Gaza told ISM that, “The Israeli military is targeting medical facilities. 77% of medical facilities in Gaza have sustained damage, some of which have been completely destroyed.”

***

Massacre in Shejaiya: Nearly ninety people were killed by Israeli forces today, most of them in one of Gaza’s poorest and most crowded neighborhoods:

“Those of us who worked in Shifa can say that last night was the worst night of our lives,” says Dr. Mads Gilbert, a Norwegian doctor at Shifa. He has come to Gaza many times to provide medical assistance, including during the previous two Israeli assaults in 2008/2009 and 2012.

“Israeli impunity is a huge medical problem,” Gilbert says. “Every single dead child and adult, and all the injuries, all the amputations, are one hundred percent preventable. This is a man-made disaster. Cynically planned and brutally executed by the government of Israel.”

As we watch the horrifying slaughter unfold in Gaza, bear in mind the Israeli psychosis that fuels and justifies it. Here are comments from three rightwing Israelis – two leading politicians and a professor – who very much reflect a strain of mainstream thinking in Israel, one that the international media largely avoids noting.

Each, in their different ways, is advocating a genocide of the Palestinians.

Ayelet Shaked, of economics minister Naftali Bennett’s Jewish Home party, calls on her Facebook page for murdering the mothers of what she terms Palestinian “terrorists” (a very broad concept indeed in current Israeli thinking) so that they cannot give birth to more “little snakes”:

They have to die and their houses should be demolished so that they cannot bear any more terrorists. They are all our enemies and their blood should be on our hands. This also applies to the mothers of the dead terrorists. …

[The terrorists] are all enemy combatants, and their blood shall be on all their heads. Now this also includes the mothers of the martyrs, who send them to hell with flowers and kisses. They should follow their sons, nothing would be more just. They should go, as should the physical homes in which they raised the snakes. Otherwise, more little snakes will be raised there.

Mordechai Kedar, a lecturer on Arabic literature at Bar Ilan University, believes the sisters and mothers of Palestinian “terrorists” should be raped:

A terrorist, like those who kidnapped the boys [in the West Bank on June 12] and killed them, the only thing that will deter them, is if they know that either their sister or mother will be raped if they are caught. What can we do? This is the culture that we live in.

Note that his university did not reprimand him. They defended his comments:

The purpose was to define the culture of death of the terrorist organizations. Dr Kedar illustrated in his words the bitter reality of the Middle East and the inability of a modern and law-abiding country to fight the terror of suicide bombers.

And finally we have Moshe Feiglin, a deputy speaker of the Israeli parliament and a member of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, urging the Israeli army to kill Palestinians in Gaza indiscriminately and use every means possible to get them to leave:

[Netanyahu] announces that Israel is about to attack military targets in their area and urges those who are not involved and do not wish to be harmed to leave immediately. Sinai is not far from Gaza and they can leave. This will be the limit of Israel’s humanitarian efforts. … All the military and infrastructural targets will be attacked with no consideration for ‘human shields’ or ‘environmental damage’. …

The IDF will conquer the entire Gaza, using all the means necessary to minimize any harm to our soldiers, with no other considerations. … The enemy population that is innocent of wrong-doing and separated itself from the armed terrorists will be treated in accordance with international law and will be allowed to leave. Israel will generously aid those who wish to leave.

A source at Damascus Police Command said terrorists fired 11 shells that fell down in the surrounding area of the vegetable market in al-Zablatani neighborhood, injuring 18 citizens and causing material damage to a number of shops and cars.

Eight other shells fell on many areas in al-Abasyeen, causing the injury of a civilian and material damage to the properties in these areas.

In Hasaka, three citizens were killed and 5 others were injured by explosive device planted by terrorists inside a market in Hasaka city.

A source at the governorate’s Police Command told SANA that the terrorists planted the explosive device inside a market in Sinema al-Cahira Street in Hasaka downtown.

In Damascus Countryside, a civilian was killed and eight others were wounded by terrorist mortar shells that targeted Jaramana.

A source at the Police Command said the terrorists fired a mortar shell on al-Rawda neighborhood, adding that the shell also caused material damage to the properties in the area.

***

A friend in Syria updated: “After crucifixion (literal), beheadings, chopping off limbs (from either sides).. ISIS now announces the new rule about “girls circumcision” in areas under their control.”

“Why haven’t they supported Gaza with money and arms? Where are their jihadists, and why didn’t they send them to defend our people in Palestine? …what’s happening in Gaza is not a separate, random event. The occupation of Palestine, invasion of Iraq, division of Sudan, and attempts to divide Iraq today are linked events.

Events are planned by ‘Israel’ and the West, we never doubt that. However, doing their dirty work were always the states of tyranny and backwardness in our Arab world.

Was it not Abdul Aziz al-Faisal who told Britain that he doesn’t mind giving Palestine to the ‘poor’ Jews in 1915?

Didn’t these same countries support and fund the crimes of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Satanic Brotherhood, in Syria in the 70s and 80s?

When ‘Israel’ attacked Lebanon (2006), these states on behalf of Saud called the Resistance irresponsible, adventurous. They encouraged ‘Israel’ and the West to reject a cease-fire until the Lebanese Resistance was destroyed.

…The Arab League’s role became to call on NATO to besiege Arab peoples and states that failed to comply. All these events, and other events that may seem smaller in importance, are a chain to achieve one aim.

This aim is to liquidate the Palestinian cause. And here they are in Gaza, assuming the same role they played in Syria. In Gaza, using “Israeli’ terrorism, and in Syria, using terrorism from 83 different nationalities.

International Journalism Award From Mexican Press Club March 2017

about me

Eva Bartlett is an independent writer and rights activist with extensive experience in Syria and in the Gaza Strip, where she lived a cumulative three years (from late 2008 to early 2013). She documented the 2008/9 and 2012 Israeli war crimes and attacks on Gaza while riding in ambulances and reporting from hospitals.
Since April 2014, she has visited Syria 7 times, including two months in summer 2016 and one month in Oct/Nov 2016 and her latest visit in June 2017 (to Aleppo, Homs, al-Waer, Madaya, al-Tall, Damascus).
Her early visits included interviewing residents of the Old City of Homs, which had just been secured from militants, and visiting historic Maaloula after the Aramaic village had been liberated of militants. In December 2015, Eva returned to old Homs to find life returning, small shops opened, some of the damaged historic churches holding worship anew, and citizens preparing to celebrate Christmas once again.
On her 5th visit in June-August 2016, she went twice to Aleppo, also visiting: liberated Palmyra; Masyaf to interview survivors of the terrorist attacks on Aqrab and Adra; survivors of the May 23 terrorist attacks on Jableh & Tartous; and the Barzeh district of Damascus, as well as returning again to Maaloula and Latakia.
On her sixth visit to Syria, in October and November, she visited Aleppo twice more, as well as areas around Damascus. The testimonies Eva gathered in Aleppo starkly contrasted narratives corporate media had been asserting.
On her seventh visit to Syria in June 2017, she revisited Aleppo, including going to eastern areas formerly terrorist-occupied, finding that hospitals had been militarized, basements turned into prisons. She also went to the highly-propagandized over village of Madaya, as well as al-Waer, Homs, and al-Tall.
Many of her published Syria writings, videos, photos can be found at this link:
https://ingaza.wordpress.com/syria/
A more detailed account of her activism and writings can be found here:
https://ingaza.wordpress.com/about-me/